The Alamo in Thirteen Days and Why Texans Still Remember It

Some military history is about winning. This is about losing in a way that won. A few hundred men, an old Spanish mission with walls designed to keep out Comanche raiders and not a modern army, and thirteen days in which the commander of the Mexican republic's army learned that a delay can cost you the war.

If you want the Texas of legend, you can have it from a movie, and the movie will get several things wrong. If you want the thing that actually happened, read the dates. They are more dramatic than the legend, and more instructive, because every one of them presents a choice that a particular man made with the facts in front of him. Here are the thirteen days, and the weeks after them.

The setting: why there was a fight at all

Texas in 1835 was a province of Mexico, part of the state of Coahuila y Tejas, settled largely by Americans who had come on Mexican land grants, together with Tejanos whose families had lived there for generations. Under the Mexican Constitution of 1824 the states had real authority. Then Antonio López de Santa Anna, who had come to power as a champion of the republic, abandoned the federal system and set up a centralized government. State legislatures were dissolved or curbed. The grievance Texans felt was the grievance of people who had been promised self-government and then told it was cancelled.

I owe you the whole picture, and the whole picture includes an unwelcome fact. Many of the Anglo settlers held slaves, and Mexico, which had moved against slavery, was a source of friction on that point. The cause was not only liberty, and an honest account does not pretend otherwise. But the immediate cause of the revolt was the destruction of the federal constitution and the arrival of a centralizing army. Tejanos such as Juan Seguín fought for the Texan cause, and Tejano defenders died in the Alamo. This was a rebellion against a dictator before it was a rebellion against a nation.

The Texans began fighting in October 1835 at Gonzales and went on to take San Antonio de Béxar in December. The old mission across the river, the Alamo, became a fortress by default. It was a large compound, roughly three acres, with long walls that needed far more men than the garrison had to defend properly.

The siege, day by day

February 23: Santa Anna arrives

On February 23, 1836, the Mexican army appeared in San Antonio. Santa Anna had marched north in the dead of winter, and he arrived sooner than the Texans expected. About fifteen hundred Mexican soldiers occupied the town by that afternoon, with more coming up. The Texan garrison, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis, a young lawyer commanding the regulars, along with Colonel James Bowie, who led the volunteers, numbered some one hundred and fifty to start, and perhaps a few more later. Bowie, ill, soon yielded overall command to Travis. David Crockett, the former congressman from Tennessee, had arrived with a small party of volunteers and was among the defenders.

The first day set the pattern. A blood-red flag went up, a signal that no quarter would be given, and Travis answered by firing the largest cannon. Bowie, believing Travis had acted hastily, sent an emissary to ask about terms. The command was split and the garrison was cut off. A siege had begun.

February 24: Travis writes to the people of Texas

Travis wrote a letter on February 24, addressed "To the People of Texas & All Americans in the World," and sent it out of the fort with a courier. It is one of the most famous letters in American history, and it is worth reading. He reports that he is "besieged" by a thousand or more Mexicans under Santa Anna, that the enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, and that he has "answered the demand with a cannon shot." Then comes the line that Texans can recite: "I shall never surrender or retreat." The letter closes with the words "Victory or Death."

Look at what Travis was doing. He was not writing a farewell. He was recruiting. The letter asks for help "with all dispatch," and it is addressed to people who might still arrive in time. Travis expected relief. That is why the siege is about timing, and why the question that haunts the story, where was Fannin, is a real one.

February 25 to 29: the long wait

The days that followed were a grind. Mexican batteries moved closer and shelled the fort. The Texans made sorties, burned some huts that gave the enemy cover and strengthened their walls. A norther blew in and the temperature dropped. The defenders had little sleep, and each night they stood to arms. Couriers went out. Some slipped through.

Colonel James Fannin, at Goliad about ninety miles away, ordered out a relief column of roughly three hundred men on February 26, but it turned back almost at once, and the force returned to Goliad. Fannin has been criticized for his decision, and the criticism is not unfair, but the reality was that Texas had no real army, no unified command and no way to compel a column to arrive on time. The Texan cause suffered from the very thing it had rebelled against: a government that could not coordinate. Texas had declared its grievances against a government that did not govern, and was about to discover the feeling from the inside. It is a fair rule that the first thing a rebellion needs is a committee, and the second is for the committee to stop meeting.

March 1: thirty-two men come in

On March 1 thirty-two men from Gonzales, volunteers who had answered the call, slipped through the Mexican lines and entered the Alamo. This is the most remarkable fact in the story. These men knew where they were going. By then the garrison could see the odds. Thirty-two men walked into a fortress with a force of well over a thousand around it, and they did it on purpose. The reinforcement raised the garrison to something like one hundred and eighty to two hundred and fifty, a range that historians cannot narrow, because no complete roster of defenders was kept.

March 2: a declaration, forty miles from nothing

On March 2, at a small town called Washington-on-the-Brazos, delegates meeting in convention adopted the Texas Declaration of Independence. Look at how it is built. It is a direct imitation of the American Declaration: a statement of why the people were acting, a list of grievances against the government that had ruled them, and a declaration of independence. The list of grievances, as in 1776, is the heart of it, and it faults the Mexican government for overturning the Constitution of 1824 and for denying jury trials and public education. If you want to see what the original American model looks like, read The Grievance List in the Declaration Reads Like a Charge Sheet Against Power. Texas used the same form to justify the same act.

The irony is thick. The delegates were declaring independence while the garrison that was buying them time was still alive, and they did not know it was about to die. The convention would go on to write a constitution for the new republic. The men in the fort had no idea any of it was happening.

March 3 and 4: the last appeals

Travis kept sending appeals for reinforcements, and few came. Santa Anna, who thought of himself as the Napoleon of the West, chose to storm the walls, which is the sort of self-image that has cost a great many armies a great many men.

A story is told that Travis drew a line in the dirt with his sword and invited those willing to stay to cross it. It is a wonderful scene, and I would like to tell you it happened. There is no contemporary evidence for it. It first appears in print decades later, and it does not seem to have come from any survivor. I mention it because the real story is better. The men who stayed did not need a line on the floor. They had been given a choice for thirteen days, every one of which they could have used to leave.

March 5: the last evening

On the night before the assault, the Mexican columns formed up in the darkness. The defenders, exhausted after days of siege, were about to face the attack.

March 6: the final assault

Before dawn on March 6, Mexican columns advanced on the Alamo from several directions. The Texan defenders fired from the walls, and the first two assaults were thrown back. On the third try the attackers breached the walls. Once the walls were breached, the fight moved into the compound and the rooms, and the garrison was overwhelmed. Travis was killed early, on the north bastion. Bowie, too ill to rise, was in his bed. Crockett's end is one of the debated parts of the story: some accounts have him dying in the fight, others that he was captured and executed. I will not choose for you.

The Mexican army lost many men taking the Alamo, though the estimates vary widely and I will not give you a figure. Santa Anna ordered the surviving defenders executed, and a few non-combatants were spared. Susanna Dickinson, the wife of one of the artillery officers, her infant daughter and some other women and children were spared and sent to Gonzales, with Travis's slave, Joe, to carry the news.

It would be dishonest to treat the Alamo as an unmixed triumph. It was a defeat. The defenders were killed. The fort fell. What the siege purchased was time.

What thirteen days bought

Time for what? For the convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos to declare independence and organize a government. For Sam Houston, commanding the Texan army, to gather what force he could. And for the Texans of the countryside, who in the weeks after the Alamo fled east in what became known as the Runaway Scrape, to understand what the fighting was about.

It also cost Santa Anna. He had committed his army to storming a mission, and he had lost many of his best men taking it. He had also hardened the Texan resolve. The battle cry, "Remember the Alamo," did not come from a historian. It became the rallying cry at San Jacinto.

March 27: Goliad

The Alamo is the better remembered, but a darker event followed. Fannin, who had delayed at Goliad, finally withdrew in March, was overtaken by Mexican troops and surrendered on March 20 after the two-day battle at Coleto Creek that began on March 19. He and his men gave up on the understanding, as many of them believed, that they would be treated as prisoners of war. On Palm Sunday, March 27, on orders from Santa Anna, the prisoners were marched out and shot, more than four hundred men by the count most historians now give. Fannin himself was among them. A few men escaped.

The Goliad massacre belongs in any honest telling because it explains what the Texans fought for in the weeks after. They were not fighting for an abstraction. They were fighting an army that had killed prisoners. A second cry joined the first: "Remember Goliad."

April 21: San Jacinto

Houston retreated east for weeks, drawing criticism, and pulled the Mexican army after him. Santa Anna, overconfident, divided his forces. On the afternoon of April 21, 1836, Houston struck near the San Jacinto River, catching Santa Anna's force at rest. The fight itself lasted about eighteen minutes, though the pursuit and killing went on longer. The Texan army, which was heavily outnumbered in total but fought a divided enemy, smashed Santa Anna's army. The cry was "Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!"

On the next day Santa Anna, in the dress of a common soldier, was found and brought into camp. He was forced to sign orders directing his remaining forces to leave Texas. The treaties signed at Velasco secured an end to the fighting. Texas was, in practice, independent. It would be a republic for nearly ten years before it entered the Union, and its story belongs with the larger story in Federalism Lets Fifty States Experiment, and the Constitution Planned It, because the question of what Texans were entitled to under a federal system was the question that began the revolt.

Why Texans still remember it

Here is where the objection comes in, and it is a fair one. A skeptic says: the Alamo is a myth. The defenders were not fighting for liberty in the abstract, they were land-seekers and slaveholders, the great set-piece of the story is a fiction, and the real moral weight lies on the other side. Santa Anna was a dictator, yes, but Mexico had its own claims.

Some of this is right. The Alamo story has been inflated. The line in the dirt is a legend, and the mixed motives of the settlers are part of the record. Any teacher who tells the story as a morality play with no complications is doing the students a disservice.

But the skeptic's conclusion does not follow. Three points.

One. The men chose. Whatever their reasons for coming to Texas, the men in the Alamo had a thirteen-day opportunity to leave and stayed. The choice is the thing.

Two. The cause was political liberty. The immediate quarrel was over the destruction of a federal constitution and its replacement by centralized power. Tejanos and Anglos fought on the same side. That is a cause conservatives have always honored.

Three. The fall bought a country. In no other state is a single battle so much a part of civic memory. Teaching it truthfully, with the failures included, is how to keep it.

The best way to honor the Alamo is the way the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence would have wanted: with the facts. The story of a small group who held a place long enough for a government to form is as American as any. It echoes the time bought at other moments, as at Valley Forge or on Christmas night in 1776, and it echoes the writing of Thomas Paine's The Crisis and the Words Read Aloud to a Freezing Army, which was read to soldiers who needed a reason to stay.

The case in brief

1. The Texas Revolution began as a fight to preserve a federal constitution and local self-government against Santa Anna's centralizing regime.
2. From February 23 to March 6, 1836, a garrison of roughly two hundred men held the Alamo against an army many times its size, and thirty-two men from Gonzales chose to enter on March 1.
3. Travis's letter of February 24 asked for help, and the Texas Declaration of Independence, adopted March 2, modeled itself on the American one.
4. The fall of the Alamo and the massacre at Goliad on March 27 hardened the Texan cause, and San Jacinto on April 21 won the war in a short, decisive fight.
5. The story is best remembered with its complications, including the settlers' mixed motives and the legends that grew up around it.

What you can do: read Travis's letter of February 24 in the Texas State Archives' online collection, and then read the Texas Declaration of Independence alongside it.